Vindictiveness and the Search for Glory in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein

Harry Keyishian

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49:3 (1989),
201-10

{201} It is unfortunate that the phrase "Frankenstein's monster"
has, in the popular imagination, become associated with the
lurching, inarticulate being portrayed in numerous films by Boris Karloff and others. In the
novel that inspired those films, written by a teen-aged Mary
Shelley, the creature is highly articulate and intensely
self-analytical about his poignant situation. So is the novel's
protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, the tragic overreacher who
brings to life and then attempts to destroy his creature.

From its first publication early in 1818 Frankenstein has
excited interest and curiosity, but in recent years the work
has, justly, received serious scholarly attention for its
brilliant foreshadowings of numerous modern concerns.
Frankenstein has been interpreted as a tale of excessive
ambition, a social critique, warning about the dangers of
technology, and a myth of creation. Psychological and
psychoanalytical interpretations have also been offered: the
novel has been read as a tale of the "double," in which Victor and
the creature are seen to be aspects of the same being; the
monster has been characterized as a projection of the raging id,
carrying out its creator's forbidden, destructive, unconscious
wishes. In recent years, feminist scholars have been attracted
to the work as a reflection of birth trauma and as a male
appropriation of female functions and texts. The novel's
ability to generate and sustain such a range of views amply
demonstrates the suggestive richness of its artistic texture.1

In these pages, I would like to discuss the novel from a
different and, I think, especially apt perspective. The
aspirations and interactions of the major figures of the story
-- Victor Frankenstein, his nameless creature, and the young
sea-captain to whom he tells his story -- prefigure and
exemplify Karen Horney's account of the destructive effects of
self-idealization, pathological vindictiveness, and the "search
for glory." In turn, Horney's views provide excellent insights
into the dynamics of the novel and the psychology of its major
figures.

Mary Shelley's mother, Mary
Wollstonecraft, author of the feminist classic A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), died shortly
after her daughter's {202} birth in 1797. Mary Shelley was
raised by her father, William
Godwin, a widely known radical philosopher who encouraged
her to read widely and introduced her to the leading literary
figures of their generation. One of these was the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, with
whom she fell in love in 1814 and, at the age of
17, eloped -- a romantic story, marred by the fact that Shelley
was already married and abandoned his wife to run off with Mary,
and by the tragedies that followed: the infant death of their
first child in 1815
and the suicides of Harriet, Shelley's abandoned first wife, and
of Mary's half-sister Claire [Fanny], both in 1816.

The writing of Frankenstein occurred during this period
of their lives. In the spring of 1816 Mary and Percy, living
near Geneva, were visited by
Lord Byron and his doctor and
traveling companion, John
Polidori. To pass the time during a spell of rainy weather,
Byron proposed a contest: that each member of their party write
a ghost story. The others tried but soon gave up; Mary had
trouble getting started but, determined to produce a work that
would, in her words, "speak to the mysterious fears of our
nature" [Introduction 7],
finally found inspiration in a particularly vivid dream of a
"pale student of the unhallowed arts, kneeling beside the thing
he had put together." In her dream, she "saw the hideous
phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of
some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an
uneasy, half-vital motion" (Shelley, pp. ix-xi). From mid-1816 to mid-1817, amidst her
personal tragedies and travels, and her own pregnancy, she
worked on the novel, which was published anonymously in January
1818. Critical reception was mixed, but public interest was
intense. The title character, Frankenstein, is an
intellectually ambitious, moody, willful young man (rather like
Mary's husband Percy, many scholars have observed) who is never
content with the ordinary knowledge his university education
provides. Filled with dreams of performing unprecedented feats,
he seeks and eventually discovers the secret of animating dead
matter. The prospect of actually creating life -- of playing God -- thrills him:

A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many
happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No
father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I
should deserve theirs. (p.
52)

To complete his work, and to attain the God-like status he
desires, he isolates himself from his friends and family and
from the healing influences of nature.

Horney (1950) clearly describes what occurs when an individual
seeks to gain a sense of integration and identity through
self-idealization. "In the process," she writes, "he endows
himself with unlimited powers and with exalted faculties; he
becomes a hero, a genius, a supreme lover, a saint, a god" (p.
22). He also, of course, turns away from true sources of growth
within {203} himself, striving through imagination to fulfill
his search for glory. This search Horney says, "can be like a
demoniacal obsession, almost like a monster swallowing up the
individual who has created it" (p. 31).

The drive to attain glory, Horney points out, can override "the
checks which usually prevent our imagination from detaching
itself from actuality." We need, for our well-being, "the vision
of possibilities" and the "perspective of infinitude," but we
must also understand limitations and necessities:

If a man's thinking and feeling are primarily focused upon the
infinite and the vision of possibilities, he loses his sense for
the concrete, for the here and now. He loses his capacity for
living in the moment. (p. 35)

As he grows more involved in actualizing the idealized figure of
his imagination, this individual loses contact with all that
makes human contentment possible.

In Frankenstein, Victor isolates himself from his friends
to pursue his experiment:

In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house,
and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and
staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation . . .
It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a
more plentiful harvest or the vines yield a more luxuriant
vintage, but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature.
(p. 53)

In pursuit of his extravagant dreams, Victor cuts himself off
from all the forces that might connect him with ordinary
existence. Further, to ensure that his creation will completely
fulfill his ambition, Victor collects individual human body
parts of great size, strength, and beauty with which to build
it. When he at last assembles the creature and gives it life,
however, he is repelled by the actual product, which is "a
miserable monster," a "thing such as even Dante could not have conceived"
(p. 57). He is so horrified, in fact, that he abandons the
creature, hoping it will simply go away and die of neglect.

Such a development is clearly anticipated by Horney. The search
for glory and the all-out striving to actualize the idealized
self must, she points out lead inevitably to self-hate:

The glorified self becomes not only a phantom to be pursued: it
also becomes a measuring rod with which to measure his actual
being. And this actual being is such an embarrassing sight when
viewed from the perspective of godlike perfection that he cannot
but despise it. (p. 110)

Because reality keeps interfering with the flight to glory, the
individual grows to hate it, and to hate himself. This process
Mary Shelley has dramatized in {204} Victor's disappointment at
viewing his actual creation, so far inferior to the race of
"excellent" beings he had dreamed of creating. And, as the
novel proceeds, the creature behaves terribly, murdering or
causing the deaths of several innocent people, including
Victor's younger brother, his closest friend, and his bride.
Victor's response is to give his life over to revenge by
pursuing the creature to the death.

The novel thus seems to dramatize the situation Horney describes
as taking place within the "pride system." Because "pride and
self-hate are actually one entity," it is inevitable that
antagonism will grow up between the components of the
personality: the "unique, ideal person" and the "omnipresent
stranger (the actual self), always interfering, disturbing,
embarrassing." The ideal self "turns against this stranger with
hate and contempt." Self-hate, Horney says, "makes visible a
rift in the personality that started with the creation of an
idealized self" (pp. 110-112). In her portrayal of Victor
Frankenstein's relationship to his monster, a considerable
imaginative feat, Mary Shelley has given dramatic life to that
"rift" and to "the rage of the proud self for feeling humiliated
and held down at every step by the actual self" (p. 114).

Had she gone no further than this with her material, Mary
Shelley would have produced a competent gothic tale. But she raised
her book above that level by entering imaginatively into the
mind of the creature itself and keenly tracing its development
from innocent benevolence to cruel vindictiveness.

Horney describes, in a general way, the processes that go into
the formation of the arrogant-vindictive type:

Like every other neurotic development, this one started in
childhood -- with particularly bad experiences and few, if any,
redeeming factors. Sheer brutality, humiliations, derision,
neglect, and flagrant hypocrisy, all these assailed a child of
especially great sensitivity. (p. 202)

In order to survive, the child stifles his softer feelings, such
as compassion for self and others:

He may make some pathetic and unsuccessful attempts to win
sympathy, interest or affection but finally chokes off all
tender needs. He gradually "decides" that genuine affection is
not only unattainable for him but that it does not exist at
all. (p. 202)

Because this individual comes to give up all hope of being
loved, he develops compensating needs for "vindication, revenge,
and triumph" (p. 203); he comes to live for a day of
reckoning.

Explaining his murderous actions to Frankenstein, the creature
asserts that he {205} has behaved badly only because of the ill
treatment he received from his creator and from the world:

Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably
excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.
Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous. (pp. 95-96)

To prove his case, the creature describes in detail the
experiences that have made him what he is. In the course of
doing so, he demonstrates considerable understanding of the
psychological processes that have shaped his personality.

His first recollections, the creature reports, were of
undifferentiated physical impressions: an intermingling of
lights, sounds, smells, and feelings. Compelled by hunger and
cold to seek food, shelter, and clothing, he was eventually able
to sort out his sensations and identify sources of pleasure --
the bright moon, trees and water, the songs of birds -- and to
gain such pragmatic knowledge as the uses and dangers of fire.
We are to understand from his account that he was from the start
fully sentient, capable of gathering information and drawing
inferences about his experiences.

But what inferences did his experiences make possible? From the
start the creature was rejected by all. His creator fled from
him in horror. The shepherds and villagers he encountered
attacked him and drove him away. He understood why when he
finally saw his own image in the water:

At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I
who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became convinced
that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with
the bitterest sensations of dependence and mortification. (p. 108)

And so the creature was deprived of the experience of total
acceptance and uncritical love which is one of the saving
legacies of normal infantile development.

The next set of encounters with humans aids the creature in some
respects, but in others makes his situation even worse. In
hiding, he observes a human family's daily round of life,
following their troubles and changing fortunes. From hearing
the Delaceys speak, he learns human language and manners; from
entering imaginatively into their experiences, he learns to
identify with their aspirations and to sympathize with their
feelings. Desiring to share their harmonious and happy
relations, the creature dreams of someday presenting himself to
them and gaining their acceptance; he hopes that his inner
virtues and benign intentions will compensate for his hideous
appearance. Of course, when the family does see him, they flee
in horror, leaving him all the more alone, embittered, and
outraged.

We must, of course, make allowance for the fictional form in
interpreting these developments: in the novel, the creature is
horrible not just to Frankenstein {206} but to himself and to
everyone else; he is objectively ugly. This experience parallels
the subjective sense of a child who has suffered constant
rebuffs and rejections: the feeling that he is an unacceptable
thing, a monster.

Having learned to read, and thus having access to human history
and wisdom, the creature comes to feel even more isolated. From
Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther,
an enormously popular sentimental novel of the time
which concerned the heartbreak and suicide of a disappointed
young lover, the creature learns of "lofty sentiments and
feelings"; in Plutarch's
Lives, he reads of
"high thoughts," the deeds of great men, and the nature of human
vice; and from Paradise
Lost, which seemed to provide the closest analogy to his
own situation, he discovers the proper relationship between God and his creation. Sometimes
the creature identifies with Adam, as the only being of his
kind, except that Adam has been made "a perfect creature, happy
and prosperous, guarded by the special care of his Creator"; but
more often, he identifies with Satan, because watching the
"bliss" of others makes him feel "the bitter gall of envy." (p. 124.)

In short, the creature has come to understand the nature of
human love, but has discovered that he never can share it; he
has learned of human society, but has been made to feel he will
never be part of it; and he knows the proper relationship
between man and God, but has been imperfectly created and then
unjustly neglected by his "God," his creator, Victor
Frankenstein, who has failed to fulfill his responsibilities to
the being he brought to life. The creature has come to identify
with human values and to wish to live by human standards, but
cannot have what others take for granted: a human identity.

All that is left to him, therefore, are feelings of envy -- the
emotion, Horney says, that most contributes to the callousness
which vindictive individuals demonstrate toward others:

It is a bitter envy -- not for this or that particular asset,
but pervasive -- and stems from his feeling excluded from life
in general. And it is true that, with his entanglements, he
actually is excluded from all that makes life worth
living -- from joy, happiness, love, creativeness, growth. (p.
211)

Feeling that others are much better off than he, the
arrogant-vindictive type, Horney points out, resents the way
they seem to flaunt their happiness before him. What Mary
Shelley has nicely fictionalized is the sense of self that such
a person might develop: the sense of being a monster, forever
barred from human intimacy.

The creature's responses well demonstrate this mechanism.
Rejected by the family he identified with, from whom he hoped to
gain acceptance and friendship, he is overcome by "rage and
revenge":

{207} I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and finding
myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread
havoc and destruction about me, and then to have sat down and
enjoyed the ruin. (p. 130)

From that moment he declares "everlasting war" against the human
species and especially against his creator.

Freud (1916/1963), too, has given an account of the assumptions
that underlie this state of mind. He paraphrases the vindictive
person's case against existence in these terms:

Nature has done me a grievous wrong in denying me that beauty of
form which wins human love. Life owes me reparation for this,
and I will see that I get it. . . . I may do wrong
myself, since wrong has been done to me. (p. 161)

The character whose underlying assumptions Freud is paraphrasing
here is Shakespeare's
spectacularly villainous Richard III, who compensates for his
physical deformities by seeking the destruction of others; but
Freud maintains that the complaint is a universal one:

We all think we have reason to reproach nature and our destiny
for congenital and infantile disadvantages; we all demand
reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love.
(p. 161)

It is for this reason that the complaint of Mary Shelley's
creature touches us all: it is, potentially, our own.

Vindictiveness will not, of course, solve the monster's
underlying problem, which is the need for companionship. This
is clear from his account of the murder of Victor's young
brother, whom the monster had met accidentally on the road not
long after his rejection by the DeLacey family. Aching for
human company, he had determined to kidnap a child and raise him
as a friend, training him to accept his hideous appearance.
When the boy also rejects him, and in the process reveals that
he is a member of the Frankenstein family -- indeed, the brother
of his detested creator -- the creature in his rage strangles
him.

The creature is astute enough, however, to realize that he has
gained no permanent satisfaction from his revenge. It is
because he realizes his underlying need for companionship that
he confronts Frankenstein to demand the creation of a female of
his own kind:

It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world;
but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.
Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless and free
from the misery I now feel. (p
139)

{208} This development, too, is predicted in Horney's
analysis. For the arrogant-vindictive individual, she writes:

the grapes of life, though he has declared them sour, are still
desirable. we must not forget that his turning against life was
not a voluntary move, and that the surrogate for which he
exchanged living is a poor one. (p. 212)

The individual who can grasp this is in a position to recognize
the limitations of his vindictive stance and understand his true
need for acceptance and companionship.

But in the novel the creature is robbed even of that
consolation. Victor, moved by pity for the creature's plight,
at first consents to his plea and gathers the body parts and
equipment necessary to create a mate for it. But then, out of
fear of the destruction the pair might cause should the creature
break his promise to live peacefully, Victor destroys the female
just when he is at the point of bestowing life upon her. Victor
deems the act necessary for the safety of the human species,
but, of course, the creature is outraged and embarks upon a
cruel campaign of revenge. He kills Victor's closest friend,
Clerval, and strangles Victor's bride on their wedding night.
With nothing left to live for, Victor in turn dedicates his life
to the pursuit and destruction of the monster, exhausting
himself and dying in the process. The creature, left utterly
alone, without even his enemy for company, finally ends his own
life in the frozen north.

Before going to his lonely death, the creature has one last
chance to reflect on his life. He recognizes that his
vindictive actions were not freely chosen:
"I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse which I detested
yet could not disobey" (p.
208). And he stresses the futility of this mode of
fulfilling his emotional needs: "For while I destroyed his
hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever
ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I
was still spurned" (p.
210). He has come to recognize the compulsive and
self-defeating nature of his pursuit of revenge.

Mary Shelley's novel has dramatized the consequences of
self-idealization, as described by Horney, and has sketched the
development of arrogant-vindictiveness as an interpersonal
strategy. Victor's ardent wish to actualize an "idealized self"
inevitably led to disappointment, to the creation of an equally
exaggerated "despised self," here fictionalized as a horrible
monster who shatters its creator's dream of glory. In the
creature himself we see the "hardening" process that results
from a pathogenic childhood environment and can culminate in the
development of vindictive attitudes.

The novel does even more, however. It dramatizes another
process described by Horney: the "central inner conflict" that
appears late in analysis, {209} when the "emerging constructive
forces of the real self" (p. 112) begin to assert themselves and
struggle against the pride system, which is the core of the
neurosis. In Horney's view, it is only when this happens that
the sources of authentic growth and creativity within each
person can be released.

To appreciate this aspect of the novel, we must take account of
its narrative strategy. The
story is told in the form of letters sent home by Robert
Walton, a sea captain who has rescued Victor in the course of
his Arctic travels. All the "present" action of
Frankenstein takes place on board the ship as the captain
hears out Victor's extraordinary story. The creature himself
also appears to Walton, after Victor's death, to express his
regrets and announce his intention to destroy himself.

In a sense, then, the story takes place in the consciousness of
the explorer -- both Victor and the creature perhaps being
projections of certain elements of the narrator's mental
processes -- and is a revelation of his "central inner
conflict." It is the narrator, in the end, who
absorbs and benefits from the lesson of Victor's life.

Walton is an ambitious young man who has embarked on a voyage
never taken before, hoping to make unprecedented discoveries in
unexplored areas to confer "inestimable benefits" upon all human
kind. He wants to discover a passage to the Pole and to
learn the "secret of the
magnet"; he feels he deserves to "accomplish some great
purpose" (pp. 16-17). In
short, he is, like Victor, about to embark on a search for
glory.

But certain forces and needs -- Horney would define them as
healthy ones -- coexist with Walton's ambitions. The search for
glory is a potentially isolating experience, but Walton
strongly feels the need for an understanding companion in his
travels, "a man who would sympathize with me, whose eyes would
respond to mine" (p. 11).
When Walton rescues Victor, nearly exhausted after his long
pursuit of the creature, he immediately sees he has found that
companion. But he has found more: he has found in the
experiences of Victor and the creature warnings against
presumption, self-idealization, and vindictiveness.

Victor appears in Walton's life at a point analogous to the
"most turbulent period of analysis," when the patient confronts
his central inner conflict:

it is at bottom this question: does the patient want to keep
whatever is left of the grandeur and glamour of his illusions,
his claims, and his false pride or can he accept himself as a
human being with all the general limitations this implies, and
with his special difficulties but also with the possibility of
his growth? There is, I gather, no more fundamental crossroad
situation in our life than this one. (pp. 356-357)

If the individual proceeds along the path of growth, he will
begin to "experience himself for the first time as being neither
particularly wonderful nor despicable but as the struggling and
often harassed human being which he really is" (p. 359).

{210} At the end of the novel, having heard Victor's story and
having met the creature and heard its expression of deep regret,
Walton turns his ship homeward. It is a decision he makes
reluctantly, after urging by his fearful crew: "Thus are my
hopes blasted by cowardice and indecision; I come back ignorant
and disappointed" (p.
204). But shortly after he makes his momentous decision,
the symbols of his inner struggle vanish: Victor dies and the
creature trudges northward to die.

The novel may, finally, express a degree of ambivalence on the
subject of ambition. The author sees its dangers but also finds
something special and glorious about those who strive beyond
human possibility. Partly, this may be due to the spirit of
romanticism, which produced the Byronic hero, the
larger-than-life figure of daring sins and lofty aspirations.
Mary's husband, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, was himself an intellectual rebel and an
impetuous, ambitious individual with self-idealizing
tendencies.

At the same time, Mary's life experiences at the time she wrote
the novel -- the deaths of her children, the suicides of persons
close to her, the precedent of her own brilliant mother's death after
childbirth -- all made her aware the limitations and realities
of human aspiration. To that, she seems to have added
considerable wisdom about human behavior and profound insight
about the workings of the human mind. As a result, her work
continues to intrigue and enlighten us today.

Notes

1. The amount of recent work on
Frankenstein is too large to summarize here, but a few
suggestions are in order. For general background on
Frankenstein, see In Search of Frankenstein by
Radu Florescu (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975). A
superb and essential collection of critical studies is The Endurance of Frankenstein,
edited by George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1979). The Letters of Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley, edited by Betty T. Bennett
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) are a
valuable source of psychological background. Important new
light is shed on the composition of Frankenstein by Anne K. Mellor in her fine study Mary
Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York:
Methuen, 1988). Mellor's extensive bibliography covers the
ground well.

References

Freud, S. (1916/1963). Some character-types met with in
psychoanalytic work. Character and Culture. New York:
Collier Books.